To start, I pluck small bunches of feathers from the bird’s breast and shove them into a plastic bag for future crafts.
This takes a long time, mostly because every part of the bird’s body contains a different color or texture of feather. I want all of them, vowing to make the most of this bird whose life I’ve taken. But I’m also postponing actually picking up the knife and cutting. Eventually, Scott gets antsy.
“Are we going to do this?” he asks gently.
I nod and wipe the down from my fingers. When the knife is in my hand, Scott begins to read.
“ ‘Begin by making an incision all the way through the skin from the breastplate to the vent’—that’s the anus.”
I shiver at his last word, then take a deep breath. My knife pierces the skin and I glimpse not blood and gore but taut, pink, familiar muscle. I relax a little. It’s a sight I’ve seen hundreds of times, whenever I peel back the plastic wrap on a package of boneless skinless chicken breasts. The remaining steps are simple and reveal surprisingly little blood. It’s not much different from pulling the giblets out of a Butterball turkey, really. The organs are small and easy to throw in the trash and then forget about.
Guidebooks call pheasants large birds and they are, at least when you see them bobbing around in the wild. But plucked or skinned, even a mature male pheasant looks terribly scrawny compared with the fryer chickens I’m used to cooking.
We invite Scott’s parents, aunt and uncle, all of whom live nearby, to dinner. I spend the whole day preparing our meal. I decide to leave the bird whole because it somehow feels more respectful than cutting it into pieces like fried chicken. I brown the bird on both sides. Then I sauté some sliced onions and apples, stir in white wine and apple cider, put the bird back in the pot and slide the whole thing into the oven, covered, for a couple of hours.
Scott insists on buying steaks to grill, too, because the bird only weighs a couple of pounds, not enough for six adults. I protest at first, not wanting something as mundane as supermarket beef to overshadow my hard-earned pheasant. But I’ve never had pheasant before, and know that it might not taste very good, so I give in.
Before the guests arrive, I smooth our best tablecloth over our small metal table and carry the chairs from our desks into the dining room. I fold cloth napkins and place them around the table. I light candles.
When I carry the bird to the table, everyone oohs and ahhs. I am too nervous to take the first bite but Scott’s aunt Kay spears a bit of breast with her fork, pops it into her mouth and chews.
“It’s good,” she says, her eyes widening so I know she means it.
I taste it. It is good. Sweet and tender. Not at all exotic or gamey, it tastes like an especially flavorful chicken. Comfort food. As we eat, I retell the story of the hunt. The guests listen politely as I gush over Tessa’s pointing abilities and build to the story’s dramatic, execution-style conclusion. At the end of the meal, there are no leftovers.
As Scott and I wash the dishes, I reflect that this is what eating meat should be. The animal was the centerpiece of the entire meal—the entire evening, really. We talked about its life—what little of it I glimpsed, anyway—not just its taste. We marveled at its place on our dinner table, and we felt grateful. We did not take it for granted, like we would a hen raised in cramped quarters and then killed, wrapped in plastic, frozen and tossed into a grocery cart.
Eager to hunt again, I sign up for another workshop, this time for rabbit. One morning in January, I wake up hours before sunrise to drive over the mountains to the Willamette Valley, to a wildlife management area that appears to be one giant mass of blackberry bushes—a horribly invasive species in this part of the state—intersected by a few winding paths of mowed grass. As in the pheasant hunt, we divide into small groups and head out onto state-owned land with the help of experienced volunteers. This time, not all of the hunters are female, and about half are teenagers.
As in the last workshop, we sit through a brief classroom lesson before we bundle up and head into the chilly fog. I’m nervous again, and still uncomfortable with my gun. I’m also excited to get started, mostly because of the dogs, whom I can’t wait to see in action.
The volunteer guides each have three or four beagles with triangular bells dangling from their collars. The dogs are actually tied together with a thick rope. There’s enough slack that they can run around comfortably, but if one tries to break out on his own, he gets dragged alongside the others until he can get his feet back under him. When I first see them, I can’t help but smile. They’re adorable, with pudgy bellies and floppy, velvety ears. They look like Snoopy, except that their muzzles are fuzzier and their big brown eyes are wetter and sadder than in the comics. It has never before occurred to me that they’re hunting dogs.
When the dogs catch a whiff of rabbit, they start to whine and pull toward the bushes where rabbits are supposedly hiding. The guide lets go of the rope and the dogs dart into the thorny thicket.
One of our guides explains that when a rabbit is scared out of hiding, it tends to run, like most wildlife, in a big circle.
“Nine times out of ten, the rabbit will end up where it started,” he says confidently.
This doesn’t make sense to me. The place it started is the place it was roused from safety by a yelping dog. Why go back there?
But the guides seem to know what they’re talking about. When the dogs are out of sight, our guides listen to the yelps and peeling bells and order us around: “Run! Get up there!” “Get ready!” “Back up!” “Hurry, you’re out of position!” I follow the orders until, suddenly, a rabbit darts out of a shrub to my left.
“Shoot it!” one guide yells.
The rabbit runs straight across a wide path in front of me. I shoulder my gun and line up the sights. I pull the trigger and nothing happens. I fumble for the safety and then pull the trigger again. Bang!
The rabbit somersaults to the far side of the path, then lands on its side.
“Nice!” The guide slaps me on my back and runs over to pick it up. The dogs emerge from the bushes and hurry over to sniff the rabbit.
“The first rabbit of the day!” Another guide shakes me by the shoulders. Other hunters walk over, smiling at me and peering at the rabbit in the guide’s hands.
This must be what it feels like to win an Academy Award (minus the gown). Everyone is congratulating me. I feel excited but so stunned that I can’t quite believe it’s really happening to me. I want to get that rabbit in my hands.
Before I do, one of the volunteer guides takes out a pocketknife and cuts off the animal’s head and feet, then tosses them, like softballs, into a nearby blackberry thicket. When he hands it to me, the rabbit is half the mammal it used to be. It’s still warm, and it feels surprisingly thin in my hands. I expected it would be chubbier.
Next, he instructs me in skinning the animal. I start around the neck, tugging a little at a time until the hide peels off like a union suit. The skin is slippery and translucent on the inside, with lusciously soft fur on the other. The guide raises his eyebrows when I wrap it in a plastic grocery bag and tuck it in my backpack.
“Just chuck it into the bushes,” he tells me. “You don’t have to pack it out.”
“No, I want to keep it.”
“What? Why?”
As I struggle to come up with a reason, I suddenly picture Scott at home, tying fishing flies on a winter evening. Rabbit fur is commonly used in flies, and sometimes costs several dollars for a three-inch swatch. “My husband ties flies,” I tell him. “We’ll use it.”
The guide nods toward the blubbery wad of skin and fur now inside my backpack and smiles and shrugs, as if to say, Sure you will.
Next, he tells me how to gut the animal, which is basically the same procedure as gutting a pheasant. Once I’ve cut the abdomen open, he reaches in and pulls out the liver, a thin, black, gelatinous sheet that looks far too big to have come from the rabbit in my hands.
A small percentage of wi
ld rabbits carry tularemia, a bacterial infection that can be transmitted to humans. To determine whether your rabbit is infected, the guide says, you should inspect the liver.
“This one looks good,” he says. “See how it’s smooth and uniform? An infected liver will look like someone sprinkled salt on it.”
With that, he tosses the liver into the bushes.
“Go ahead and pull all that stuff out,” he says, pointing generally to the offal, “and toss it, too.”
He assures me that it will be eaten, enthusiastically, by vultures, coyotes and other scavengers. I start scooping parts out and plopping them onto a weedy shrub next to me. Gravity slithers them down, branch by branch, until they hit the ground. I look down at the animal in my hands. It looks like a skinned cat.
That night, I arrive home with one rabbit and no appetite. I open a bottle of wine and pour most of it into the ziplock bag containing my rabbit. Or what’s left of my rabbit, anyway. I pour the rest of the bottle into a pint glass and start sipping. I don’t feel particularly guilty about killing this rabbit. But I do feel awfully sorry for myself that I have to eat it.
I go online and identify my rabbit as an Eastern cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus), one of the most common members of the rabbit-hare family. These animals spend most of the day sleeping in a tangle of brush or a burrow in the ground. At night, they come out and eat a combination of leaves and grasses. Rabbits are often considered a nuisance because of the damage they can wreak on crop fields. Oregonians with a valid hunting license may hunt varmints, including rabbits, 365 days a year.
The next day, I debone the meat and cut it into chunks, which I toss in flour and sear. Then I simmer the meat, along with carrots, onions, potatoes, celery and peas, to make a stew. The meat is light-colored and sweet, like pork. And because I accidentally overcook it, it’s slightly rubbery, but nonetheless delicious, and Scott and I polish off the whole pot in two meals.
Over the next year, I go on trips with friends and hunt for duck, goose, grouse, chukar, Hungarian partridge and pheasant. I hunt all over Oregon. I take a bird-hunting vacation to Montana, to visit Andy and his girlfriend Jessie, both of whom recently moved there for graduate school.
As I bring home meats that I’ve never tasted before, I can’t help but grow more interested in cooking. I spend hours online, reading through recipes for a dish that will do justice to my latest quarry. I borrow wild game cookbooks from the library. I buy them from bookstores. What used to be a chore—something to hurry up and get through so I could quell my grumbling stomach—suddenly becomes an honor.
One of the things I appreciate most about hunting is that it highlights the uniqueness of each animal, each meat, each meal. Instead of “thighs” or “breasts,” a meal is composed of something specific, such as “the American widgeon from that slough in Montana on a cold, cloudy day last fall.”
An animal’s uniqueness extends to its taste—animals are what they eat, and wild animals eat a more diverse diet than livestock. Farmed animals in the United States feed almost entirely on corn. In fact, if you analyze the typical American diet down to the molecular level, processed corn makes up most of it: from the feed that our livestock turn into meat, to the corn syrup that sweetens our drinks. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan quotes a biologist who refers to North American humans as “corn chips with legs.” In my own post-hunting meals, I notice huge taste variations within a single species, particularly duck. I begin paying close attention to what was inside the gullet of each individual. I try to connect a duck’s food preferences to the taste of its flesh, which falls somewhere along the spectrum between “fishy” and “beefy.”
There are many wonderful cookbooks written about wild game. As with everything DIY, many come with a heaping dose of nostalgia. One of my favorites is Fish and Game Cookery, published in 1945. In it, author and outdoorsman Roy Wall laments the decline of wilderness—and Americans’ corresponding wildness—in a chapter titled “In Case of an Emergency,” which lists recipes for roasted beaver tail and young muskrat. “When America was an expanding frontier, when vast wilderness areas were trackless, it often became necessary for persons to eat anything and everything they could get their hands on,” he writes. “Now, with civilization making picnic grounds of these once remote regions, something to eat is much less accidental.”
Hunting has changed the way I shop for food. Now, when I saunter through one of several massive groceries in Bend, I take note of the swollen displays of produce flown in from all over the globe. And I realize, yet again, how detached I am from what I usually eat. In the past, whatever I felt like eating, I bought. There were no skills required, no special habitats, no exclusive seasons. When torrential rains ruined the blueberry crop in Oregon, shelves were stocked with blueberries from Maine. When I got a hankering for fresh berries in January, well, I was in luck because a shipment just arrived from Chile.
This could not be more different from the days to which Wall was referring, when our diet depended on where we lived and what plants and animals could survive there. If you didn’t own livestock and didn’t possess the skill necessary to stalk and kill a wild animal, you probably didn’t eat much meat.
I’m not ready to forgo store-bought meat altogether, which would turn me into a vegetarian for all but a few meals a year. But I do start paying closer attention to where my food is raised. I stop buying produce that is grown outside of the United States. I have no trouble finding poultry that was raised in Oregon or Washington. Beef and pork, on the other hand, rarely bear any such labels. I hesitate over the meat cooler, turning over each package of steaks or chops, hoping to find more fine print. For all I know, these cuts of meat could come from the other side of the world.
As I grow more confident carrying a gun in the field, I find I’m still uncomfortable coming home and admitting to certain people that I’ve been hunting. When we visit with cousins who have young children, and my mother mentions my recent pheasant hunt, I feel cruel. My eyes widen and I shake my head at her, pleading with her not to talk about it. How could I explain to a child what I’d done? All of my rational justifications for hunting seem so meek compared with the basic idea of doing no harm.
I consider what it means to call myself a hunter, and why I’m embarrassed about it. A colleague of mine tells me that he took his son to a Hunter Safety course in Virginia, where the instructor told the students upon graduating: “Congratulations. You are now a member of a despised community.”
When friends from college and high school hear that I’m learning to hunt, the first question out of their shocked mouths is usually: “Are you a member of the NRA now?” At first it surprises me that they would even think this. I’m still the same person I was before I started hunting. I still support reasonable gun control. Of course I haven’t joined the National Rifle Association.
My friends’ question reveals a familiar assumption. Before I moved to Bend, I, too, viewed hunters and NRA members as an interchangeable throng of gun nuts. But opposing gun control wasn’t always the primary goal of the NRA, which was founded in 1871 by two veteran Union officers. The men were dismayed by the poor marksmanship of their Civil War troops, so they founded a group to promote safe gun handling and target practice. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the NRA became highly politicized. Rising gun violence—including the high-profile assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy—prompted a national debate over the interpretation of the Second Amendment. Amid this discussion, the NRA’s voice grew louder and louder. The organization stoked fears that liberal politicians were coming to pry every last gun from our hands.
On its website, the NRA proudly calls itself the “largest pro-hunting organization in the world.” Yet, during election season, I notice that the NRA endorses politicians who oppose gun control, labeling them “pro-sportsmen” despite pathetic voting records on environmental issues. Meanwhile, only a fraction of proposed gun bills would apply to the basic rif
les and shotguns used in responsible hunting. In fact, even if several of the NRA’s worst nightmares simultaneously came true—expanded background checks, mandatory waiting periods, limits to the number of guns purchased by an individual per month, a permanent ban on assault weapons—hunting could continue as it has for more than a century. A hunter has about as much use for a semi-automatic Glock 19 pistol—which can shoot more than one round per second—as a chef does a hand grenade. Why, then, should we allow the NRA to use hunting—the most sane, responsible reason for modern gun ownership—as its argument for weapons that have nothing to do with the fair pursuit of wildlife?
The truth is, many of us don’t. The NRA has about 4.3 million members, which is less than 5 percent of American gun owners. At my Hunter Safety class, however, and at every hunting workshop I’ve attended, I’ve received a handful of NRA pamphlets and a formal invitation to join the organization. This has reinforced my long-held belief that hunters have adopted gun rights as their leading political cause. (And my own experience suggests that they’re succeeding: Buying a gun remains quick and easy to do.) That’s not to say that I think everyone who belongs to the NRA is a nut. The NRA runs many admirable programs, including a massive gun safety campaign for children and cheap, accessible basic firearms training for adults. The NRA also does hunters a service by compiling hunting-related news on an easy-to-navigate website.
Every once in a while, a different kind of pamphlet is slipped into the stack handed to me at the end of class. There’s one from the Oregon Hunters Association. Or the Boone and Crockett Club. Hunting is, by definition, a mostly solitary pursuit. Still, there are thousands of sportsmen’s groups in the United States. And unlike the NRA, most of them are focused not on firearms but on wildlife habitat and hunting access. It is only when I’m flipping through these pamphlets that it dawns on me: The politics of hunting extend way beyond the gun.
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